John Osborn is currently a Professor of Surgery at the University of Minnesota and Director for the Minnesota Consortium for Autonomic Neuromodulation. He earned his PhD in Physiology from Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
My research focuses on understanding the role of the nervous system in long-term control of arterial pressure and the pathogenesis of hypertension. My research has focused primarily on understanding how circulating hormones, such as angiotensin II and aldosterone, and dietary salt, interact with the sympathetic nervous system during the developmental phase of experimental hypertension. This work has included studies of both central and peripheral neural pathways contributing to the development of neurogenic hypertension. This research has been continuously funded by NIH since 1988 and had led to 110+ peer reviewed publications.
More recently I have shifted my efforts to investigate the neurogenic underpinnings of the maintenance of hypertension. This new focus has a greater clinical significance since antihypertensive therapies are generally prescribed once hypertension is established and the mechanisms for initiating hypertension are likely to be different than those that maintain it. Thus, I further narrowed my focus to peripheral mechanisms of neurogenic hypertension exclusively. This was motivated, in part, by recent reports that it is now possible to perform target specific sympathetic ablation in humans using medical devices. The initial success of this approach to treat humans with drug resistant hypertension represents a major advance in the field. Another advantage of this approach is that it avoids the unwanted side effects of drug therapies that affect neural pathways in the brain. Thus, our studies investigating the detailed mechanisms of region/organ specific sympathetic nerve activity (SNA) in the maintenance of neurogenic hypertension provide a translational platform for development of novel antihypertensive therapies in the very near future.
I also serve as Director of the Minnesota Consortium for Autonomic Neuromodulation (MCAN). MCAN specializes in preclinical and clinical research for the development of novel devices to treat neurogenically mediated cardiometabolic diseases (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, obesity).
